A Journey from This World to the Next

A Journey from This World to the Next is a satirical work by Henry Fielding, first published in 1743 as part of his Miscellanies, the three volume collection of his shorter writings produced during the years between Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. The work belongs to the broader eighteenth century tradition of satirical fantasy writing that included Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and various French and German precedents.

The narrator of the book has recently died and presents the account of his journey through the afterlife. The book combines several different satirical modes. The opening sections describe the narrator’s coach journey along the road to Elysium, with various other recently deceased souls travelling alongside and offering opportunities for satirical portraits of contemporary types of unworthy persons. The middle sections describe his judgment at the gates of Elysium and his observations of how various famous historical figures from antiquity through the recent past actually appear when stripped of their reputations and assessed on their actual merits.

The later sections of the book contain an extended account by the narrator of the previous lives lived by a particular soul named Julian the Apostate, who in this account has been reincarnated many times across the centuries in various professions and stations of life. The Julian section is essentially a series of small picaresque tales, each one describing a particular life and the moral lessons it offered or failed to offer. Fielding uses the device to comment on various typical professional and social types in a way that allowed him satirical freedom that more direct social commentary would not have permitted.

The book is uneven by Fielding’s standards. The Elysium sections are sharp and funny but the long Julian sections sometimes feel padded. The work is most enjoyable as a compendium of Fielding’s satirical preoccupations during his early career, before the long novels gave him space to work out his social observations at greater length. It runs about two hundred pages and reads in a single sitting. For readers who liked the satirical side of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, this is a useful supplementary work showing Fielding in a more openly satirical mode. It pairs naturally with The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great from the same Miscellanies collection.